An important paradigm in the development of new diagnostics and therapies for human diseases and disorders is the characterization of the gene expression of defined cell types. The cellular complexity of many tissues (such as the nervous system), however, poses a challenge for those seeking to characterize gene expression at this level. The enormous heterogeneity of a tissue such as the nervous system (thousands of neuronal cell types, with non-neuronal cells outnumbering neuronal cells by an order of magnitude) is a barrier to the identification and analysis of gene transcripts present in individual cell types. One way to overcome this barrier is to tag gene transcripts directly or indirectly, i.e., mRNA, present in a particular cell type, in such a manner as to allow facile isolation of the gene transcripts without the need to isolate the individual cells of that cell type as a preliminary step. We describe such a technology here.